Whoa! Joe Biden: The Surge Is A Failure. What do you all think of this?

WASHINGTON — A leading Democrat on Saturday declared last year's troop buildup in Iraq a failure. Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the military push didn't succeed because U.S. troops remain committed there in large numbers and political reconciliation has not been achieved. "The purpose of the surge was to bring violence in Iraq down so that its leaders could come together politically," said Biden, D-Del., in this week's Democratic radio address. "Violence has come down, but the Iraqis have not come together." He later added, "There is little evidence the Iraqis will settle their differences peacefully any time soon." Biden offered an early rebuttal to next week's testimony by Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador there. Petraeus and Crocker are expected to say the recent buildup in troops has succeeded in improving security. But they also likely will say that a period of assessment is needed this summer before officials can decide whether troop withdrawals can continue. Democrats have called this approach unacceptable and said they would pursue an alternative policy through legislation. They said their focus will be on restoring the strength of the Army and Marines and refocusing the nation's resources on fighting terrorists in Afghanistan. "I believe the president has no strategy for success in Iraq," Biden said. "His plan is to muddle through, and hand the problem off to his successor." Republicans say they are satisfied with the recent drop in violence and that more time is needed to improve the situation there.

Public Comments

1. He's a Democrat in an election year. What else do you expect him to say? He's got to get elected or picked as VP running mate or he's out of a job in Jan 2009.
2. I like Biden. Very intelligent man. I really think if he was President he could figure out some kind of plan to work this out the best way it could at this point. Still, I think its too early to judge the success of the surge, whoever the next President is, they'll have a strategy, which will hopefully bring about the best resolution to this conflict to the interests of the Iraqis and the Americans.
3. Take the blinders off already. We've been told for the past five years how well Iraq is going. If it's going so blasted well and everything is so successful, it's time to go home and let the Iraqi government and its people take care of themselves. What say you?
4. It is a failure with the troop levels higher than they were during the invasion. The cost of the war is astronomical to say the least. The Republicans sure wont pay for any of it with their tax breaks for the rich. Here is the cost of Bush's War clock from zfacts, enjoy: http://zfacts.com/p/447.html
5. many in the military say the same thing, they say the truce with Al Sadr has more to do with the decrease in violence than anything else. the surge is a drop in the bucket, if Al Sadr and his militia decide to openly defy Maliki/ US. Al Sadr is the most popular leader in Iraq, a nationalist who wants the people to control the oil, Maliki with US backing it want to give control over to foreign companies, at least 60% of the Iraqi people agree with him.
6. who do you trust the President with a 30% approval rating or Congress with 22%?
7. He is right. The surge was a failure. It had little to do with decreased violence. The surge was all for show. The Mahdi Army laid low for 6 months, this was where the decrease of violence came from. How much more time does Bush need before he realizes that there is no military solution to Iraq?
8. Joe is just pissed because bush wouldn't run the war the way Joe wanted to
9. Joe Biden is setting up a scenario in which the Republicans can be blamed for every single set back that has occurred in this war - even though it has been the Democrats that have been impeding this war every step of the way - publicly declaring that the United States has lost, initiating proposals to withdraw all of the troops, trying to give the enemy a timetable for withdrawal, making every effort to give terrorists all of the legal rights afforded an American citizen, attaching earmarks to the troop funding bills, and essentially, cheering the enemy on and espousing a policy of total defeat for the United States. His intent is to blame the Republicans for any and all consequences that result from the remote possibility that a Democrat will get in office and cut and run. Hopefully, the average American can clearly see his real agenda and know who is truly to blame if we lose this war and the support of the 25 allied nations fighting with us in Iraq. And, more importantly, who is truly to blame for the inevitable resulting consequences of allowing the Islamic terrorists a victory earned with the terror tactics and indiscriminate slaughter of thousands of innocent victims.
10. He's correct and honest. The reality is that five years after a US invasion that was expected by its organizers to swiftly replace the government of Saddam Hussein with a stable US client regime, 160,000 US troops remain deployed in the country and—as the extraordinary security measures surrounding Cheney, even in the fortified Green Zone, make clear—no area can be claimed to be fully secure. What is happening is that the same media that promulgated the lies used to promote the war in 2002 and 2003 is now—more than five years later—largely promoting the official story that the so-called surge launched by the Bush administration over a year ago has pacified the country, leading to a marked improvement in conditions there. The mounting of the US death toll to 4,000—900 having been killed since the “surge” began—does not fit into this good news story. Therefore, it has received far less coverage than when the death toll topped 1,000 in September 2004, 2,000 in October 2005 and 3,000 in December 2006. In reality, this appalling new statistic does not begin to reveal the massive human cost of the Iraq war. It has been estimated that for every fatality in Iraq, 15 troops are wounded—an unprecedented ratio attributable to better protective gear and improved medical technology. Many tens if not hundreds of thousands more have suffered serious psychological damage from their participation in a brutal colonial war. According to credible estimates, for every American soldier and Marine killed in Iraq, some 250 Iraqis have lost their lives over the five years since the US invaded and occupied the country. The prominent British polling agency, ORB, produced an estimate of 1.2 million civilian deaths last September, a figure that closely tracked the findings of a public health survey conducted 18 months earlier by a team of scientists from Johns Hopkins University, which placed the most likely Iraqi death toll at 665,000 as of early 2006. In addition to the dead, over 4 million Iraqis have been driven from their homes by violence—half of them forced into exile and the rest becoming refugees in their own country. Tens of thousands of Iraqis are imprisoned without charges in a US-run gulag, where many have faced torture and ill-treatment. Since the “surge,” the numbers of Iraqis arrested daily by US forces has doubled
11. I dunno. The whole frickin' war is a failure. War is always failure, death, destruction, debt. It cannot be anything but. And so I'm not surprised to hear the "surge" is a failure. Why are our troops even in this country? Where the f' is al-Qaeda? What the hell happened to justice for 9/11?
12. TLDR, but I am sure it is just politics as usual. Too bad these idiots don't see that their politics are literally killing people, both American and Iraqi. This is certainly not supporting our troops or their well being at all. It just emboldens our enemies throughout the world. Biden has been castrated politically because he has an insatiable appetite for the White House but as he has found out by trying to run several times, everyone thinks he is a c*ck. So he is the voice of the blind eunuch who does nothing but put our troops in more danger.